In Unscripted America: Indigenous Languages and the Origins of a Literary Nation (Oxford University Press, 2017), Princeton University English Associate Professor Sarah Rivett studies how colonists in North America struggled to understand, translate,

In A Vulgar Art: A New Approach to Stand-Up Comedy (The University Press of Mississippi, 2014), Ian Brodie, an associate professor of folklore at Cape Breton University, brings a folkloristic approach to the study of stand-up comedy.â¦

In her new book, Politics, Media and Campaign Language: Australiaâs Identity Anxiety (Anthem Press, 2017), Stephanie Brookes, a Lecturer in Journalism at Monash University, explores the power of election campaign language to offer a window into the

Language is one of the complex systems facilitating communication; language is a system producing the inside and the outside of the individualâs awareness of self and other. However, language is also a tool for and of ideological battles,

In his monumental new book, Interpreting Islam in China: Pilgrimage, Language, and Scripture in the Han Kitab (Oxford University Press, 2017), Kristian Petersen, Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Nebraska in Omaha, takes his

As the basis for a major world religion, the Qurâan is one of the most influential books of all time. But when it first appeared, the Qurâan was in Arabic. Most Muslims today are not native-Arabic speakers. Bruce B. Lawrenceâ¦

CleanAlessandro Duranti, “The Anthropology of Intentions: Language in a World of Others” (Cambridge UP, 2015)

Alessandro Duranti is Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at UCLA, where he served as Dean of Social Sciences from 2009-2016. In his book The Anthropology of Intentions: Language in a World of Others (Cambridge University Press, 2015),

Philosophers have long tried to silence the physical musicality of voice in favor of the purity of ideas without matter, souls without bodies. But voices resonate among bodies and texts; they are singular, as unique as fingerprints,

Sometimes we have to depend on philosophy to explain to us why something apparently simple is in fact extremely complicated. The way we use referring expressions â things that pick out the entities we want to talk about, such asâ¦

CleanSarah Ruden, “The Face of Water: A Translator on Beauty and Meaning in the Bible” (Pantheon, 2017)

On this program, we talk to Sarah Ruden about her new book, The Face of Water: A Translator on Beauty and Meaning in the Bible (Pantheon, 2017). Novelist J. M. Coetzee praised the book, saying, âIf you seriously want toâ¦

For this episode, New Books in Jewish Studies interviews Lewis Glinert, Professor of Hebrew Studies at Dartmouth College, where he is also affiliated with the Program in Linguistics. His book, The Story of Hebrew (Princeton University Press, 2017), can

Contemporary scholarship on the Mughal empire has generally ignored the role Sanskrit played in imperial political and literary projects. However, in Culture of Encounters: Sanskrit at the Mughal Court (Columbia University Press, 2016),

The unprecedented crime of the 1994 Rwandan genocide demanded an unconventional legal response. After failed attempts by the international legal system to efficiently handle legal cases stemming from the genocide,

As described by Dovid Katz, Yiddish is an extraordinarily multifaceted language: a language that is at once acclaimed as sacred and dismissed as deficient, profoundly connected to centuries of religious and cultural history yet marketed superficially,

In Borrowed Voices: Writing and Racial Ventriloquism in the Jewish American Imagination (Rutgers University Press, 2016), Jennifer Glaser, Associate Professor of English and comparative literature and an affiliate faculty member in Judaic studies and w.

Teenagers get a lot of bad press. Whether itâs how they look, how they dress, the things they say, the way they say it â it sometimes seems as if they canât get anything right. And when it comes toâ¦

Recent controversies surrounding sexual harassment and assault on college campuses have sparked heated discussions surrounding the everyday experiences of women on college campuses. Female students and faculty members have often felt at odds with their.

According to the blurb, Linguistic Diversity and Social Justice: An Introduction to Applied Sociolinguistics (Oxford University Press, 2016) âexplores the ways in which linguistic diversity mediates social justice in liberal democracies.

From its opening fragment on âFragmentsâ to its âPossibly dolorous tropical lyrical coda,â Simon Critchleyâs new book is a pleasure to hold in the hand and the mind. ABC of Impossibility (Univocal Publishing, 2015) is a collect

My instinct as a researcher is usually to shy away from confrontation about foundational issues in the philosophy of language, which is probably why I do what I do (that is to say, from a generative perspective, not linguistics). Withâ¦

CleanAviya Kushner, “The Grammar of God: A Journey into the Words and Worlds of the Bible” (Spiegel and Grau, 2015)

Aviya Kushner grew up in a Hebrew-speaking family, reading the Bible in the original Hebrew and debating its meaning over the dinner table. She knew much of it by heartâand was later surprised when, while getting her MFA from theâ¦

In The Definition of Anti-Semitism (Oxford University Press, 2015), Kenneth L. Marcus, the President and General Counsel of the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, explains what it is at stake in how we define anti-Semitism.â¦

Itâs not always been clear how the study of written language fits into linguistics. As a relatively recent historical development, itâs tempting to see it as a sideshow in terms of questions about the innateness of language. But at theâ¦

Literary practices are often associated with specific social groups in particular social settings. Kate Pahlâs Materializing Literacies in Communities: The Uses of Literacy Revisited (Bloomsbury, 2014) challenges these assumptions by showing the va

In Babel in Zion: Jews, Nationalism, and Language Diversity in Palestine, 1920-1948 (Yale University Press, 2015), Liora R. Halperin, an Assistant Professor in the Department of History and the Program in Jewish Studies at the University of Colorado,

How do we learn our first words? What is it that makes the linguistic intentions of others manifest to us, when our eyes follow a pointing finger to an object and associate that object with a word? Chad Engelland addressesâ¦

CleanJames Turner, “Philology: The Forgotten Origins of the Modern Humanities” (Princeton University Press, 2014)

James Turner is Cavanaugh Professor of Humanities, Emeritus, at Notre Dame University. His book Philology: The Forgotten Origins of the Modern Humanities (Princeton University Press, 2014) recovers the significance of philology, the study of language,

Who were the Indo-Europeans? Were they all-conquering heroes? Aggressive patriarchal Kurgan horsemen, sweeping aside the peaceful civilizations of Old Europe? Weed-smoking drug dealers rolling across Eurasia in a cannabis-induced haze?

I must admit that my relationship to philosophy of language is a bit like my relationship to classic literature: I tend to admire it from afar, and rely on the opinions of people who have read it. The danger isâ¦

Screens are ubiquitous. From the screen on a mobile, to that on a tablet, or laptop, or desktop computer, screens appear all around us, full of content both visual and text. But it is not necessarily the ubiquity of screensâ¦

Propaganda names a familiar collection of phenomena, and examples of propaganda are easy to identify, especially when one examines the output of totalitarian states. In those cases, language and imagery are employed for the purpose of shaping mass opin.

A colleague once told me that people in linguistics could be divided into two groups: sheep and snipers. Iâm not sure whether this is a proper dichotomy â itâs certainly not quite canonical â but whether it is or not,â¦

It is generally accepted that lying is morally prohibited. But theorists divide over the nature of lyingâs wrongness, and thus there is disagreement over when the prohibition might be outweighed by competing moral norms.

CleanTerence Cuneo, “Speech and Morality: On the Metaethical Implications of Speaking” (Oxford,

It is widely accepted that in uttering sentences we sometimes perform distinctive kinds of acts. We declare, assert, challenge, question, corroborate by means of speech; sometimes we also use speech to perform acts such as promising, commanding,

One of the most puzzling things about humans is their ability to manipulate symbols and create artifacts. Our nearest relatives in the animal kingdomâapesâhave only the rudiments of these abilities: chimps donât have language and,

I hope Iâm not being species-centric when I say that the emergence of human language is a big deal. John Maynard Smith and Eors Szathmary rate it as one of the âmajor transitions in evolutionâ, placing it in exalted companyâ¦

Language change is like a river. When people tell you how to use language, and how not to use it, theyâre attempting to build a dam that will put a stop to linguistic change. But all such efforts are boundâ¦

The name of the New Books in Language channel might hint at a disciplinary bias towards âlanguageâ. So in some sense Ruth Finneganâs Communicating: the Multiple Modes of Human Communication (2nd edition; Routledge,

As linguists, weâre wont to get protective about languages, whether we see them as data points in a typological analysis or a mass of different ways of seeing the world. Given a free choice, weâd always like to see themâ¦

CleanJohn H. McWhorter, “The Language Hoax: Why the World Looks the Same in Any Language” (Oxford UP, 2014)

The idea that the language we speak influences the way we think â sometimes referred to as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis â has had an interesting history. Itâs particularly associated with the idea that languages dismissed as primitive by 19

Ian Haney Lopez is the author of Dog Whistle Politics: How Coded Racial Appeals Have Reinvented Racism and Wrecked the Middle Class (Oxford UP 2014). He is the John H. Boalt Professor of Law at the University of California, Berkeley,â¦

A conceptual space sounds like a rather nebulous thing, and basing a semantics on conceptual spaces sounds similarly nebulous. In The Geometry of Meaning: Semantics Based on Conceptual Spaces (MIT Press, 2014),

Nouns are the bread and butter of linguistic analysis, and itâs easy not to reflect too hard on what they actually are and how they work. In A Syntax of Substance (MIT Press, 2013), David Adger tackles this question, asâ¦

In linguistics, we all happily and glibly affirm that there is no âbetterâ or âworseâ among languages (or dialects, or varieties), although we freely admit that people have irrational prejudices about them.

CleanAneta Pavlenko, “The Bilingual Mind And What It Tells Us about Language and Thought” (Cambridge UP, 2014)

Big ideas about language often ignore, or abstract away from, the individualâs capacity to learn more than one language. In a world where the majority of human beings are bilingual, is this kind of idealization desirable? Is it useful, orâ¦

Andrea Bachnerâs wonderfully interdisciplinary new book explores the many worlds and media through which the Chinese script has been imagined, represented, and transformed. Spanning literature, film, visual and performance art, design,

When big claims are made about neurolinguistics, there often seems to be a subtext that the latest findings will render traditional linguistics obsolete. These claims are often met with appropriate scepticism by experienced linguistics practitioners,

David Bleichâs book The Materiality of Language: Gender, Politics and the University (Indiana University Press, 2013)Â is described as a wide-ranging critique of academic practice, which is almost an understatement.

Scientists â and I claim to include myself in this category â sometimes seem to be disparaging about the ability of people in general to understand and act upon quantitative data, such as information about risk in the medical domain.â¦

The recognition of speech acts â classically, things like stating, requesting, promising, and so on â sometimes seems like a curiously neglected topic in the psychology of language. This is odd for several reasons. For one,

CleanJody Azzouni, “Semantic Perception: How the Illusion of a Common Language Arises and Persists” (Oxford UP, 2013)

A common philosophical picture of language proposes to begin with the various kinds of communicative acts individuals perform by means of language.Â This view has it that communication proceeds largely by way of interpretation,

One of the risks of a telephone interview is that the sound quality can be less than ideal, and sometimes thereâs no way around this and we just have to try to press on with it. Under those conditions, althoughâ¦

Itâs tempting to think that lexicography can go on, untroubled by the concerns of theoretical linguistics, while the rest of us plunge into round after round of bloody internecine strife. For better or worse, as Patrick Hanks makes clear inâ¦

Itâs not surprising that human language reflects and respects logical relations â logic, in some sense, âworksâ. For linguists, this represents a potentially interesting avenue of approach to the much-debated question of innateness.

Pretty much everyone whoâs done a linguistics course has come across the name of Ferdinand de Saussure â a name thatâs attached to such fundamentals as the distinction between synchrony and diachrony,

Rhythm, metaphor, politics: these three features of language simultaneously enable us to communicate with each other and go largely unnoticed in the course of that communication. In An Anatomy of Chinese: Rhythm, Metaphor,

Morphology is sometimes painted as the âhere be dragonsâ of the linguistic map: a baffling domain of idiosyncrasies and irregularities, in which Heath Robinson contraptions abound and anything goes. In his new book,

Although there seems to be a trend towards linguistic theories getting more cognitively or neurally plausible, there doesnât seem to be an imminent prospect of a reconciliation between linguistics and neuroscience.

A problem with doing linguistics is that once you start, itâs kind of inescapable â you see it everywhere. At some point a few months back, I was watching a DVD of a comedy series and came to the conclusionâ¦

In language, as in life, history is constantly repeating itself. In her book The Linguistic Cycle: Language Change and the Language Faculty (Oxford University Press, 2011), Elly van Gelderen tackles the question of such âcyclicalâ changes.

The only disappointment withÂ A History of Psycholinguistics: The Pre-Chomskyan EraÂ (Oxford UP, 2012)Â is that, as the subtitle says, the story it tells stops at the cognitive revolution, beforeÂ Pim LeveltÂ is himself a major player in psych

Linguists are apt to get excited when a language is identified that exhibits exotic properties, and gladly travel halfway round the world to document it, particularly if they think itâs going to support a pet theory of theirs. Nick Enfieldâ¦

Building upon The Origins of Meaning (see previous interview), James R. Hurfordâs The Origins of Grammar (Language in the Light of Evolution, Vol. 2) (Oxford University Press, 2012) second volume sets out to explain how the unique complexity ofâ

Evolutionary approaches to linguistics have notoriously had a rather chequered history, being associated with vague and unfalsifiable claims about the motivations for the origins of language. It seems as though the subject has only recently come in fro.

In these days of increasing automation, the prospect of obsolescence is an alarming one for those of us who make a living by stringing words together instead of doing something demonstrably useful. From this perspective, itâs tempting to think ofâ

If you had to bet your life on learning a language in three months, which language would you choose? Peter Trudgillâs first choice wouldnât be Faroese or Polish; and in his book, Sociolinguistic Typology: Social Determinants of Linguistic Comp

In When Words Are Called For: A Defense of Ordinary Language Philosophy (Harvard University Press, 2012), Avner Baz sets out to make a case for the reconsideration of Ordinary Language Philosophy, or OLP, in mainstream academic philosophy.

Recent political debates around language have often been controversial, sometimes poorly informed, and usually unedifying. Itâs striking to consider that such debates have, at least in the USA, been current for more than 100 years; and perhaps surp

The idea that bilingualism can be enriching and beneficial for an individual is a popular one. But what about for a city? Here the associations are less positive, particularly if we automatically think of cities whose linguistic divisions echo theâ¦

Itâs now well over 100 years since John Stuart Mill noted that, if I say âI saw some of your children todayâ, you get the impression that I didnât see all of them. This idea â that what we donâtâ¦

Whatâs the connection between Sarah Palin and Plato? The response that leaps to mind is that theyâve both never heard of one another. But another similarity is their scepticism about high-flown rhetoric as a tool used to pull the woolâ¦

On 1 January 1993 Slovakia became an independent nation. According to conventional Slovak nationalist history that event was the culmination of a roughly thousand year struggle. Alexander Maxwell argues quite differently in his book Choosing Slovakia: .

CleanAlexander Clark and Shalom Lappin, “Linguistic Nativism and the Poverty of the Stimulus” (Wiley-Blackwell, 2011)

In linguistics, if a book is ever described as a âmust read for Xâ, it generally means that (i) it is trenchantly opposed to whatever X does and (ii) X will completely ignore it. Alexander Clark and Shalom Lappin,â¦

In the preface to Fifty Key Thinkers on Language and Linguistics (Routledge, 2011), devoted to short but attentively researched biographical sketches of major figures in the language sciences, Margaret Thomas compares the task of compiling it with that.

Itâs a sobering thought that, but for the spread of English, I wouldnât be able to do these interviews. In particular, I donât speak Swedish, and Iâm not going to try to speak Latin to a world expert on theâ¦

A thing I enjoy about this job is being encouraged to read books that unexpectedly turn out to be profoundly relevant to my own interests. Jeanne Fahnestockâs new book, Rhetorical Style: The Uses of Language in Persuasion (Oxford Universityâ¦

Zellig Harrisâs name is famous in linguistics primarily for his early work on transformational grammar and his influence on his most famous student, Noam Chomsky. However, much of his linguistic work has since fallen into comparative obscurity.

CleanJulie Sedivy and Greg Carlson, “Sold on Language: How Advertisers Talk to You and What This Says About You” (Wiley, 2011)

Weâve never been in a more crowded marketplace, with more corporations shouting for our attention and custom. Yet this choice is an illusion, as detailed in Sold on Language: How Advertisers Talk to You and What This Says About Youâ¦

Theo van Leeuwen comes to the academic discipline of social semiotics â the study of how meanings are conveyed â from his previous career as a film and TV producer. His interest in the makings of visual communication is hardlyâ¦

Over the last thirty years, Jonathon Green has established himself as a major figure in lexicography, specialising in English slang. During this time he has accumulated a database of over half a million citations for more than 100,000 words andâ¦

In the preface to this book, Keith Gilyard describes his career as 30 years of roaming the areas of rhetoric, composition, sociolinguistics, creative writing, applied linguistics, education theory, literary study, history,

I favour any book that applies the logic of Wittgenstein to quotes from the Goon Show. (Often in linguistics the reverse is true.) So I was delighted to have the opportunity to talk to Debra Aarons (University of New Southâ¦

âEvery once in a while Nature gives us insight into the human condition by providing us with a unique case whose special properties illumine the species as a whole. Christopher is such an example.â Christopher has a startling talent forâ¦

The human capacity for language is always cited as the or one of the cognitive capacities we have that separates us from non-human animals. And linguistics, at its most basic level, is the study of language as such â inâ¦

In his new bookActing White: The Curious History of a Racial Slur (Thomas Dunne Books, 2010), former White House aide Ron Christie recounts the history of the pejorative term âacting white.â He traces its lineage from the present dayâ¦

Many entries in our lexicon have an interesting history, but itâs very seldom the case that the currency of a phrase has global repercussions. In his book The âWar on Terrorâ Narrative (Oxford University Press, 2011), Adam Hodges makes a

In an enormously prolific writing and editing career, David Crystal has excelled in supplying volumes hitherto missing from the field: here a balanced and accessible introduction to general linguistics, there a lucid specialised textbook in an emerging.

CleanRobert Lane Greene, “You Are What You Speak: Grammar Grouches, Language Laws and the Politics of Identity” (Delacorte Press, 2011)

Isnât it odd how the golden age of correct language always seems to be around the time that its speaker was in high school, and that language has been going to the dogs ever since? Such is the anguish ofâ¦